Behind the scenes, the company has for years been pleading its case with EU officials to leave it alone and let free market competition take its course. (Google’s enemies say Alphabet, the parent company of Google, abuses its dominance in search and on Android to distort competition in other markets, for instance by putting its own lower quality hotel reviews above those of companies like Yelp and Tripadvisor, which historically have much higher quality reviews.)

Google was, perhaps, a bit slow to respond, and now the European Commission has two full-blown investigations into whether Google should be broken up. No one expects that to happen. But it could happen, in theory. It looks like Google is now responding in-kind, with Schmidt taking the kind of face-to-face meetings with European officials that triggered the probes in the first place.

Schmidt says the Google brand has not suffered, so far, due to the negative attention of EU regulators. “We face a number of antitrust actions in Brussels which we are addressing, but so far the brand has done well,” he said. “We argue our success should be judged on whether our customers are happy.”

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